Opening of the exhibition: Thursday, 29 June 2017, at 8 p.m. at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, +MSUM

A person can become free through acts of disobedience by learning to say no to power.

Not only is the capacity for disobedience the condition for freedom; freedom is also the condition for disobedience.

These words by Erich Fromm are the thread that ties together the exhibition focusing on three “positions” of disobedience, with the disobedient in our case being women. Their disobedience stems not only from feminism as a defining point of departure for their actions, but also from a position of revolt against and noncompliance with any form of dominance and discrimination, be it male dominance over women in predominantly patriarchal societies or militarisms, sexisms, and nationalisms of all shapes and sizes, as well as the devastating impact capitalism has on society as a whole. Acts of disobedience occur as interruptions disturbing the ingrained social arrangement of power, whereby the ideology of those in power is questioned and can therefore no longer be seen as valid or taken for granted. On the next level, the identities, borders, disciplines, hegemonic narratives, and automatic bodily responses are deconstructed and new counter-knowledge is produced. Art, as shown in the context of the Disobedient exhibition, is such counter-knowledge, an activity of critical social intervention and political upheaval.

Eulàlia Grau (1946) is a pioneer of feminist art from Catalonia. Her predominant medium is photographs taken from the press, which she then uses in photo-montages (e.g. her series Ethnographies). In addition to this she uses books, posters (as direct social actions in the streets), newspapers and videos. Her work is a testimony of Spanish society since the 1970s, when she produced her first work, and is closely linked to political and social struggle. She is a sharp observer of the class divide, and of the police and army brutality that occurred in the non-democratic, fascist Spain under Franco. For example, in …Inventemos también nosotros… / …Let Us Invent Too… (1976) she tells the story of a construction worker who was shot by the police while attempting to take part in a Catalan Culture Congress, and who committed suicide a day later in prison under suspicious circumstances.

For Grau, art is always a means of social intervention. She is a fierce critic of the unequal position of women in society, and of the mechanisms of social domination that are activated by a repressive system, as was the case under Franco’s dictatorship. There were many feminist protests against the regime in 1975 and 1976. With the support of the Catholic Church, the Spanish government passed an act in 1942 whereby a woman, once married, could no longer work, open a bank account without her husband’s permission, hold a passport or have custody of her children. The use of contraceptive pills was also forbidden, as were abortion and divorce. The protests were indelibly linked with Grau’s artistic work, as is evident for instance in Discriminacio de la dona / Discrimination against women (1977). The curator Teresa Grandas noted that even though 40 years have passed since the artist produced her first works, many of the situations she denounced still exist today.

Katalin Ladik (1942) entered the literary and artistic scenes of Novi Sad (Vojvodina, then Yugoslavia, since 1992 she has lived in Budapest) in the mid-1960s, working in radio, and as an actress in the theatre and films. She wrote poetry in Hungarian, ranging from erotic verse to ritual and experimental phonic and visual works. Her early interest in poetic, vocal experiments, experimental sound, phonetic and vocal improvisation, and her work as a visual artist with, for example, the group BOSCH+BOSCH is also notable. It was, however, her work with the voice and body that led her to performance, and subsequently to the visual arts. Katalin Ladik was the first female performer in Yugoslavia to use her own body as an autonomous medium equivalent to text and sound. Her early performances were influenced by para-rituals, shifting in the mid-1970s towards a reflection on the position of women, questioning the traditional female roles constructed by the male-dominated society. She often used her naked body in her performances to critique the constraints of patriarchy. Since the 1980s her works have been referred to as “postmodern narrative performance”. As Miško Šuvaković pointed out, “she began to recycle, copy and referentially exploit her early para-ritual and proto-conceptual performing strategies in new works, leading her from performance to cabaret and theatre.”

Besides her most emblematic performances and body art pieces in the format of photo documents, the exhibition will show a selection of music scores and collages.

Žene u crnom (Women in Black) is a group of feminist and antimilitarist activists from Serbia (active as a group since 1991). They have made “visible nonviolent resistance to militarism, war, sexism, nationalism. In short, all aspects of violence towards and discrimination against women and all those people different ethnically, religiously, culturally, sexually, ideologically.” They also founded the Women’s Peace Network/Network of Women in Black in Serbia, produced women’s alternative history and thus recorded the other to history, and organized permanent peace education.

They constantly demand accountability for the war and war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, calling for the trial of all those suspected of war crimes in The Hague, and also confronting the issues of both moral and political collective responsibility, through street actions, appeals, petitions, campaigns, attendance at commemorations, seminars, and conferences.

For more than 25 years the Women in Black have taken to the streets in Serbia and other parts of the former Yugoslavia in silent, peaceful actions encouraging society to confront its difficult past. The radicalism of their continued performances (silent performances, i.e. standings) lies not in the representation of bodies in public space, but in the attempt to struggle while “offering one’s body for some common goal.” As Dubravka Knežević wrote, “for sometimes the only action is standing in public, neither agitating nor propagandizing but bearing witness to events to which there is no obvious or immediate remedy.” To date they have organized more than 1500 peaceful actions on the street (protests, performances, campaigns). The selection of their rich archival materials (photo documentation, protest posters and similar) will be shown for the first time at the exhibition Disobedient.

Partial transfer of Dušan Tršar's retrospective, prepared by the Božidar Jakac Art Museum in Kostanjevica na Krki. The retrospective will also travel to the Gallery of Murska Sobota.

Dušan Tršar's retrospective exhibition, which was prepared by the the Božidar Jakac Art Museum in Kostanjevica na Krki on the occasion of the artist's life jubilee, presented the most important works from his oeuvre, which has been created over more than sixty years. Moderna galerija offers a selection of his works from the period between 1966 and 1984.

This period starts with the works in welded iron, in which the artist shifts from realistic manner to the creation of more and more schematic forms of the human body. In the second half of the 1960s the artist creates silhouettes mad of wooden lamellas, wire and iron rods, which are bent at the upper end and thus preserve the memory of the human form. The 1970s are then marked by sculptures made of fluorescent Plexiglass, which the artist illuminated by neon light. The design of his objects and the cold industrial character of the chosen materials are enriched by the use of color, which becomes an autonomous element. In this period Tršar joined a group of young Slovenian artists called “Neoconstructivists”. The group originally constisted of Dušan Tršar, Dragica Čadež, Drago Hrvacki and Tone Lapajne and was later joined by Vinko Tušek and Slavko Tihec. The group shared the methodological approaches related to the construction of spatial structures and constructivist and minimalist design principles, as well as their fondness for modern materials. Since the second half of the 1970s, the sculptures were becoming monochromatic, thus emphasizing the transparency of the works and permitting the viewer to look through them. The final stage of this period is represented by works, in which the Plexiglass frame is filled with glazed baked clay or bronze forms that gradually outweigh the Plexiglass.

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Dušan Tršar was born on January 18, 1937. He spent his childhood years in Planina near Postojna. Between 1952 and 1955 he attended the Blacksmiths’ School in Kropa. He graduated in sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana. In 1966 he specialized in sculpture under the professor Boris Kalin. In 1979 he started lecturing sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana, where he also held the position of dean between 1989 and 1991. In 1991 he became full professor and he continued working as a lecturer in sculpture until his retirement in 2006.
To date, Dušan Tršar has held over fifty solo and numerous group exhibitions in Slovenia and abroad. He has received several major awards for his achievements in art, including the Zlata ptica (the Golden Bird, 1970), the Prešeren Foundation Award (1978) and the Golden Plaque of the University of Ljubljana (2003). In 2012 he became an honorary citizen of Kostanjevica na Krki. He lives and works in Ljubljana and Kostanjevica na Krki.

The exhibition is supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia.

The International Centre of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana is delighted to announce Birth As Criterion, the 32nd edition of the Biennial of Graphic Arts, one of world’s oldest biennials dedicated solely to printmaking. Founded in 1955 in the midst of the Cold War, the Biennial strived from the very beginning to transgress the geopolitical polarities and so reflect Yugoslavia’s determination to choose its own path. In the more than 60 years of its existence, the Ljubljana Biennial has relentlessly responded to the ever-changing sociopolitical context, simultaneously rearticulating its own identity and strategies.

The 32nd edition takes as its starting point the transgressive moment that served as the initial catalyst of the Biennial and applies it to the present moment, radically reformulating not only the content of the event, but its very structure. This is implied in its title, Birth as Criterion, which alludes to a poem by the 20th century Slovene poet Jure Detela—a poem that provides the impulse for the self-reflection the Biennial is undertaking. In other words, even as it discards the framework of a themed show, the 32nd Biennial of Graphic Arts springs from a poem, one that does not offer the exhibition a guiding theme but rather, in its radical questioning of all polarizations, calls for rupture. The disruption introduced in Detela’s poem is echoed in the centreless structure of this year’s Biennial, which, stripped of the figure of the curator, operates instead as a self-generating entity. It employs a simple mechanism: the recipients of the Grand Prize from the last five Biennials—Jeon Joonho (2007), Justseeds (2009), Regina José Galindo (2011), María Elena Gonzáles (2013), and Ištvan Išt Huzjan (2015)—are each invited to propose one artist to take part in the upcoming event; these prospective participants are then asked to name the next five. The process then continues in five rounds, ultimately providing the 32nd Biennial with 30 participating artists.

The organic rhizomatic structure of the exhibition Birth as Criterion thus resists the hierarchical logic of the central persona of the curator and the narrativizing nature of the curatorial concept, instead proposing a myriad of potential connections and interactions between the artworks. By finding its impetus within itself, in its own history, the Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts, with this new edition, seeks to radically reflect and re-evaluate its own position. Renouncing potential comfort zones in terms of both the Biennial’s own tradition and the established protocols of contemporary art exhibition-making, Birth as Criterion sets forth manifold relations—a multiplicity that, lacking a single unifying concept, exists instead in a ceaseless flux of meanings.

Along with the main show, the Biennial is also presenting its traditional exhibition by the Grand Prize winner of the previous Biennial, in this case, Ištvan Išt Huzjan, as well as a presentation of the work of Peter Gidal, the winner of the Life Achievement Award at the 31st Biennial, and a survey exhibition by Maria Bonomi. Other projects include a book featuring the work of the Argentinian poet Alejandra Pizarnik and a kinetic installation and performance by Meta Grgurevič in collaboration with the Slovenian National Theatre Opera and Ballet Ljubljana and City of Women International Festival of Contemporary Art.